The winter chill had not eased at all beneath the daylight sun. Instead, as the sun sank westward, it grew ever more biting.
Veylin and Old Walker walked side by side through the streets of Newborn Town.
The settlement had long since become a tidy, beautiful little city.
The level White-Stone Brick Road was broad and clean, lined on both sides with closely packed, courtyard-style buildings. Cooking smoke drifted from their chimneys, weaving beneath the sky into a tapestry of everyday life.
The streets bustled with people. The townsfolk wore thick new clothes of coarse cloth, and some of the better-off residents even sported dyed felt cloaks.
Their faces no longer showed the hunger and fear of their first arrival. In their place were prosperity and... ease.
A young craftsman who had just received a merit points reward was loudly showing off a new silver ring he had bought for his wife, drawing envious looks from everyone around him.
Several children chased one another along the street, clutching malt-sugar figurines.
Veylin said nothing, his gaze sweeping both sides of the street.
This was the prosperity he had built with his own hands.
Yet on the other side of that prosperity, discordant notes were quietly beginning to sound.
Outside "Brothers, Boars, and Booze," two men, their faces flushed with drink, shoved each other and traded slurred curses. A woman in a coarse, padded coat rushed out of the tavern and tried to pull one of them away, only to be shoved to the ground, drawing a burst of laughter from the onlookers.
Veylin stopped and watched.
Guards soon arrived and hauled the two drunks away. The crowd dispersed as well, as though it had been nothing more than a harmless farce.
"Is there a limit on how much ale people can